Gaming
ESPNCricinfo & Twitter tie up to take #CricIQ social for #SLvInd
MUMBAI: ESPNCricinfo and Twitter have walked out to the middle together to take #CricIQ social for the series deciding third test between Sri Lanka and India.
Cricket fans around the world can now play CricIQ, which is ESPNCricinfo’s flagship cricket trivia game, by simply Tweeting their answers to @ESPNCricinfo.
They will then get an auto-reply as an acknowledgment of their answer and fans who Tweet the right answers the fastest climb up a leaderboard which is announced on every day of the test match. Three daily winners and the Top 3 fans at the end of the test match win exciting prizes.
Twitter India head of sports partnerships Aneesh Madani said, “Twitter is the mobile microphone for sports fans around the world when they have something to say. We have consistently worked to bring more for the cricket fan and our partnership with ESPNCricinfo, who have built one of the largest audiences in the world for cricket on the platform, is another step in that direction . With this innovation to bring #CricIQ to Twitter, we’re delighted that ESPNCricinfo is giving cricket fans another fun reason to Tweet.”
ESPNCricinfo director – business development Gaurav Thakur added, “ESPNcricinfo CricIQ has evolved to become one of the finest cricketing quiz destinations for ardent cricket fans and quizzers across the country. With the on-going India v SriLanka Test series, we decided to take the quiz social. This partnership with Twitter for #CricIQ gives fans a chance to play the quiz, and have fun with the uniquely real-time and interactive nature of the experience.”
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
